Synergy Session

I just attended the opening general synergy session with Eugenie Prime, Clifford Lynch and Stephen Abram... very energetic and enjoyable discussions about where we are as a profession, and where we are going. Questions ran the gamut from "how can we persuade business leaders that we are worth investing in?" to "how do we create the best user experience?", through questions about what is SLA going to do as an organization to support and promote librarians. The answers from the panelists were passionate and emphatic, and many of them looped back to the same basic answer: we need to have confidence and courage in ourselves, the strength to present that confidence when we provide results to our users, and the courage to present ourselves as necessary and important to our user community and upper management. There was also a lot of discussion about new technology tools and how we can take advantage of them, including the social networking aspect. Another common consensus was that we need to take ourselves to the users and not wait for them to come to us.

All in all a good way to start what promises to be a very busy day!